Jonathan Finch

Prof. Jonathan Finch is an historical archaeologist who specialises in historic landscapes, rural poverty, slavery and commemoration. These key themes intersect and inform much of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the broad heading of globalisation. His fieldwork has taken him from Harewood House, near Leeds, to the plantations of Barbados and he is recently completed directing excavations at Breary Banks, near Masham, a First World War camp where the 'Leeds Pals' battalion was trained.

He originally studied history at university, but was soon introduced to the practical joys of landscape interpretation and material culture and never looked back. He completed his AHRB funded PhD at the University of East Anglia in 1996. It was the first systematic study of historic commemorative practices that demonstrated the relationship between the forms and frequency of church monuments and social and economic factors.

After a short period as a part-time lecturer at UEA, where he also worked on the history and archaeology of Norwich cathedral close, he spent a year as a lecturer at the University of Wales, Bangor before being appointed at the University of York in 1999.

He has written widely on designed landscapes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly Capability Brown and Humphry Repton. He has also written on estate landscapes, including two edited volumes - the latest on northern European estate landscapes published by Aarhus University Press. He has also published work on the links between estates in the UK and the Caribbean, drawing on his fieldwork and excavations.